Jay Clayton went after the reporters who exposed the President's undefended gift plane — not the men who put him on it. Today you vote to make him Director of National Intelligence.

Dear members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,

I have written twice this week about four reporters — once to the President, once to the four men themselves, the night before this morning. I did not expect a third letter, and I did not expect it to be to you. But there is a single question sitting under this whole affair, and after I sent the last one I realized nobody was asking it plainly, and you are the only people in the country who can do anything about it before the day is out. So let me hand it to you clean.

Start with what actually happened, because it is worse than a leak and it is the reason your Committee exists at all. Two weeks ago a foreign government — Qatar, a Gulf monarchy — gave the President of the United States a four-hundred-million-dollar airplane and put it into service as Air Force One. It went into the air undefended. The countermeasures a plane carrying an American President is supposed to have, the ones that take years to install and certify, were skipped or crammed into a matter of weeks. And the man they flew on it has told the country, out of his own mouth and on camera, that he is number one on Iran's kill list while Iran and the United States are trading fire again.

Sit in the whole shape of it for one second, because I think Washington has gone numb to it and you are not allowed to. A hostile region hands the President a gift the size of a mansion with wings. Nobody makes sure it is safe before he boards it. It cannot stop a missile. And a country that is openly trying to kill him watches him climb aboard. The only reason he is not still up there is that his own Secret Service looked at that aircraft, understood what it was, and physically pulled him off it. That is not an embarrassment. That is the single largest security failure the office you are filling this morning exists, first and above all else, to catch and stop.

Because that is the job. The Director of National Intelligence is not a press officer and not a prosecutor. The DNI is the person whose whole reason to exist is to look at exactly this — a foreign government's gift to the President, whether an adversary can reach him, whether the aircraft under him is safe — and to see it and sound the alarm before the man is airborne. If the office had done its job, that plane never leaves the ground with him on it. This failure is not adjacent to the work you are hiring for. It is the dead center of it.

So here is the question I cannot get past, and I want you to hold it in your hand when the nominee sits down. This week the government of the United States sent federal agents to four private homes. To whose homes? Not to the home of whoever accepted a foreign monarchy's airplane on the President's behalf. Not to the home of whoever waved it into service without making it safe. Not to the home of whoever cleared a hunted head of state to board an undefended aircraft. Agents were sent to the homes of the four reporters who found out about it and told the country. The people who caused the danger have not been asked a single question. The people who caught it are before a grand jury this morning.

Why aren't they the ones getting subpoenaed — the ones who made the plane, rushed the plane, cleared the plane? That is the question, and I think it is the whole question. A government that were actually frightened by this near-miss would have its investigators at the doors of the people responsible for it. Instead the doors that got the knock all belonged to the men who caught the responsible parties out. The subpoenas are pointed at the wrong door, and everybody in your hearing room knows which door is the right one.

Now let me be fair to Jay Clayton, because I will not hang on a man a thing he did not do, and the whole force of this letter depends on my not doing it. Clayton did not accept that plane. He did not fuel it or certify its airworthiness or walk the President up the stairs. I am not going to stand here and tell you he did, and if anybody does, don't believe them. But here is what he did do, with his own hand, and it is the only thing he did in this entire story: he signed the subpoenas that sent the agents to the four reporters. Of all the doors in this affair, Mr. Clayton is the man who chose which one to knock on. And he knocked on theirs.

That is why his testimony this morning is almost beside the point, and why you already have the only evidence that matters. Confirmation hearings run on what a nominee says under the lights, and what a nominee says can be prepared for weeks. But you don't need what he says. You have what he signed — a document produced when he thought the audience was smaller — and it tells you precisely where this man points the machinery of the state when he is handed a foreign, undefended plane and a President an enemy is hunting. He points it at the press. Not at the plane.

Which is what makes the mood around him so much worse than a scandal would be. Your own ranking member, Senator Warner, calls Mr. Clayton a capable public servant with the right temperament. Your Majority Leader says he is in pretty good shape. Reading that this morning, I understood that the danger here is not a bruising fight the nominee might lose. The danger is how smooth this is. A man aims the government at the reporters instead of the plane, and the verdict forming in your chamber is capable, right temperament, good shape. The problem was never that Washington would be shocked. It's that it wouldn't be.

And there is the thing that should stop the room cold before a single vote is cast: the man asking to run the intelligence of the United States has never worked in intelligence. Not one day, in any agency, in any capacity. Jay Clayton is a Wall Street securities lawyer who chaired the SEC and then ran the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan. It is a serious résumé and I won't pretend otherwise — but it does not contain a single hour inside the intelligence community he would now command. You would be handing the country's eyes to a man who has never once done the work of seeing, and whose only act in the one intelligence crisis he has actually touched was to point the government at the reporters instead of the plane.

You have a reason to slow down that has nothing to do with punishing anyone. This seat is already being held by an acting director, Bill Pulte, who also came to it with no intelligence background — so this would be two in a row — and the renewal of Section 702 has been sitting there waiting on a confirmed DNI. So you hold the leverage and the duty in the same hand. Nobody is asking you to leave the chair empty out of spite. We are asking you not to fill it reflexively with the one man who, handed the exact failure this office exists to prevent, went looking for the people who reported it.

So here is the ask, and it is small enough to do before you vote. Put the plane in the room. Do not only ask Mr. Clayton about the subpoenas — ask him about the door. Ask him, on the record: sir, a foreign government put the President on an undefended aircraft while an adversary hunted him, and the only homes your agents visited belonged to the reporters who exposed it. If you are confirmed to run the intelligence of the United States, why were they the ones subpoenaed, and not a single person responsible for the plane? If his answer is strong, it will survive the question. If it is not, you will have learned the one thing you most need to know before you make him the eyes of the country, instead of after.

You already know how the day gets covered, so I won't pretend otherwise. One network will run the confirmation and never mention the plane. Another will run the plane and never mention that the President was genuinely being hunted and had real cause to be afraid. Setting the whole shape on one desk is the entire job of this small paper. I run it on about four dollars a day, I take no money and carry no ads, and my real name and my real phone number sit at the top of the page you are reading — which is exactly why I can send this to a Senate committee without flinching, and why there is nothing in it for me but the record.

I'm nobody, and I know it — a man with a day job and two kids asleep upstairs, writing this at a kitchen table. But the vote is real and it is today, and years from now the transcript of this hearing is going to sit in an archive next to the docket from the courthouse across the street, and someone is going to read them side by side. I would like the record to show that at least one person asked you, before the gavel, the simplest question in the whole business: agents were sent to four homes this week — why not to the door of the man who put the President on that plane?

— Michael

The Official Internet Press Secretary

Spotlight Dispatch · 45047 · July 15, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com